For those wondering, yes,I still exist.  I'm still following LJ every day.  I just tend to post everything over on FaceBook these days.  I also have a gamer blog over on Fool's Moon, where I talk about the work I'm doing, and my siblings still have their blog which they use infrequently.  I've been doing a lot of gaming lately, running a Gossamer ( Read more... )

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Saturday, I ran my first session of Abney Park's Airship Pirates.  We tried it on a cloud-based gaming platform to see how that would work, since Skype tends to be a resource hog and I couldn't get the built-in dice roller to work.  Roll 20 allows for video (though everyone had that turned off), and voice, and has a dice-roller and grid map, and my ( Read more... )

I'm getting ready to run an Abney Park game. For those who aren't aware of it, this is a post-apocalyptic, steampunk game.  Nominally, you play a group of airship pirates, who try to avoid the Empire, while raiding Neovictorian cities, trade ships, and other typical piratey things, and find shelter in sky cities.  There's potential to pick up a ( Read more... )

I've picked up the Abney Park roleplaying game, and plan on running it soon, but two of my friends have commented on how bleak the setting is. The thing is, when I think 'Steampunk' the term 'bleak' seems to fit very snugly. If you listen to Abney Park - their music is pretty much the definition of Steampunk, and if you look at a lot of Steampunk ( Read more... )

Thought:  I wonder when we'll grow out of the idea of 'evil for evil's sake' in fiction and RPGs.  Especially in RPGs.  I mean, sure, there's something pure about knowing your opposition is an irredeemable monster - it makes it that much simpler to just try to kill them, knowing you're doing "good".  But why on earth should anything be just... evil ( Read more... )

So, the Qin game was a wash.  Dropping the PCs into the middle of a fuedal Chinese setting without preparation was a bad idea -- the PCs weren't sure how to act, and I think didn't really feel connected with the setting.  I handled it well, and accept that.  So, tonight, I decided to quickly set things up and flux the campaign once more, moving ( Read more... )

Age. Not something talked about much in roleplaying games, and dealt with even less. In D&D, you have age categories, and you suffer some minor attribute slide from it, but I think only Ars Magica really addressed the idea that over time you were going to get worse, not betterThe thing is, aging makes sense. A person only progresses so far, then ( Read more... )

The girl that I run Pathfinder for has an incredible imagination, and a strong creative drive.  I think she'd be an excellent game master with some practise, and I decided that considering the themes and topics she enjoys, that Amber would be the game for her.  She doesn't know anything about Amber, but I thought to whet her appetite, I'd tell her ( Read more... )

Observations
Character 1)  Summoner / Sorcerer:  This character's actually pretty interesting.  Having summons that last minutes rather than rounds is cool, and backing it up with a few sorcerer spells adds icing to the cake.  The eidolon is a nice 'bodyguard' for the sorcerer to let you get things done without worrying about being hit.  The player ( Read more... )